Saturday, October 8, 2011

In a previous post (June 6th, 2011) I wrote about
the fall of the Roman Republic. The key milestones of the collapse were
described with commentary describing the impact of each of them. The fall of
the Republic can be seen as a connected string of events that snowballed into
an unstable political system with no center of power. Once anarchy became the
rule, the strongest man with the will to defy tradition was destined to take
power.

The fall of the Republic began with the plight of the
ex-soldier landowner whose loss of property produced a permanent underclass of
poor in the city.

This is similar to the period of the turn of the twentieth
century in the United States when poor immigrants flooded our cities and could not
obtain work. And today we have a thinning out of the middle class as some move
up the social-economic ladder and a greater number move down. America is currently
experiencing a chronic state of high unemployment which may have broad social
implications – dependency, crime, etc.

In the time of the Republic the brothers Gracchi (Tiberius and
Gaius), tied to pass laws which would solve the problem of poverty and at the
same time increase the number of men eligible for the army. This Agrarian Law
would take land from the agar publicus (public
land) and give it to the those who would agree to raise crops. Tiberius got his
law through the assembly by very dubious means but then was assassinated by
agents of the Senate who were not pleased with the loss of land they controlled
and were not willing to share their wealth with the poor. Tiberius’ brother
Gaius continued the distribution of land and pushed for increased power of the
equestrian class at the expense of the Senate. He too was assassinated during a
riot.

The deaths of the Gracchi drove a permanent wedge between
the Senate and the people causing two political factions to appear: Optimates,
who were the champions of the patrician class and Populares, who were the
champions of the plebs. These factions were more divided than the political
parties in America today because in Rome it was a case of human survival --
wealth versus poverty rather than a battle over ideology.

The other fallout of the deaths of the Gracchi was the
public perception of the destruction of the rule of law. For any political
system to be legitimate, it must be willing to stand behind a legal system that
will protect those without power. By stooping to assassination, the Senate had
proved themselves illegitimate – no better than the barbarians they felt
superior to.

When the Jurguthine War broke out in 110 B.C. the Senate’s
appointed commanders were repeatedly defeated to the embarrassment of the Roman
people. Finally the people, through the assembly, picked their own commander,
Marius, to win the war. Marius solved Rome’s recruitment problem in an eyelash
by removing the property qualification for military service and at the same
time shifted the soldier’s loyalty from Senate to commander. From that point on
the supreme commander was the “emperor maker” of Rome.

How is this similar to what we see in America today? There
is no question that the power dynamics in the United States are different than
they were in the time of the late Roman Republic. Fortunately for us the
military has always been more loyal to the president than its commanders.
Loyalty is so ingrained in our soldiers DNA that it would be hard to image any
deviation from that course. Commanders have occasionally defied presidents,
most notably in the case of Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, but these
were the rarest of events in our country’s history.

The problem in the United States is the growing power of the
central government as it increases in size. This trend is driven by the Progressive
Movement’s belief that big government is necessary to achieve what it perceives
is society’s social contract with its people. But progressive programs cost
money and at some point, maybe now, we’ll run out. Conservatives resist this
growth as wasteful and against the founding principles of the republic, because
it robs us of fundamental freedoms.

Expanding the bureaucracy, extends the power of the
executive branch by creating programs that the legislature can’t touch and won’t
eliminate. When is the last time a failed program was defunded? Never, because
the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own, driven by self-preservation. Funding
an expanding executive branch requires that property (net worth) be taken from
the people – not just from the top earners, but from all who pay any kind of
tax.

This growth in the power of the federal government resembles
the welfare experiments of Europe in the twentieth century, which failed. What
is there in the progressive ideology that drives it to duplicate a failed
system? Why don’t they understand the communism analogy?

Communism had many friends until the Soviet Union failed.
Now, those friends are hard to find because they don’t want to embarrass
themselves by supporting a philosophical system that is unworkable and
idealistic. The problem was that Marx fitted the data to his system instead of
the reverse. If he had done his analysis correctly, he would have seen the
fundamental flaws in his point of view.

The danger to the American political system rests in the
accumulation of power in the central government and the consequent loss of
freedom that accompanies it. Rather than leveling the classes, this trend will
divide them further. It’s up to the people to push for a balance between
government and liberty. If we take the middle road, our republic can survive.